Joe Pennachetti's announcement that he's retiring opens the way for a new city manager, a job of quiet but deep-seated power.

City Manager Joe Pennachetti said he was proud that “with the political turmoil, we’ve marched ahead in our role.”

By:Ed KeenanStar columnist, Published on Wed Aug 27 2014

The race is on to replace the most powerful man in the city’s government. But you won’t get a vote in the decision. In fact, you probably won’t hear much about the competition for the job at all. You may not even know who the current guy is.

On Tuesday, city council officially got notice that city manager Joe Pennachetti will be retiring this fall. Speaking briefly with reporters (his formal farewell to councillors, full of candid advice, is promised for today) he said that in a new term, “a new mayor and council should look for a change.”

Like most of what he’s said in public in the past six years that he’s been running the municipal civil service, his remarks were understated, spoken quietly so the handful of gathered press had to lean in to hear him. Acknowledging that the four years under Rob Ford have “not been normal” and presented “additional challenges,” Pennachetti said he was proud that “with the political turmoil, we’ve marched ahead in our role.”

That role involved a “balancing act”: demands for budget cuts on one side of the teeter-totter, and a responsibility to preserve services for residents on the other.

“I don’t have any regrets,” said the man who was hired under Mel Lastman, promoted to the top job under David Miller, and served as point man for Rob Ford during the tense hearings into proposed budget cuts in 2011.

And make no mistake; soft-spoken as he has been, the role he’s played is the biggest stick in the city. Who has more power than the city manager? Not the mayor, as Rob Ford’s losing vote after vote in recent years has shown. Not any city councillor, who makes do with a single vote among 44. The police chief? Maybe, though he influences only his own department, as large and important as it is.

“Without a doubt, he’s the lynchpin of the city’s government,” says Jaye Robinson, who worked with Pennachetti as a department manager before working with him in her current role as a city councillor. “The importance of the role can’t be overstated. More than the mayor or council, the city manager is responsible for keeping the city moving forward.”

Our politicians lead the city, but it’s the city manager who runs the place.

All of the city’s 35,000-plus employees report up to the city manager, and the city manager reports to city council. Though the politicians make the decisions, they generally do so relying on advice and information provided to them by the city manager and his staff. And even then, it is the city manager who has latitude to figure out how to implement their decisions — or sometimes avoid implementing them, as we saw in recent years when positions remained vacant in some departments even though budgets had been approved to fill them, or when work on a study to tear down the Gardiner Expressway and work to repair that same road were both quietly halted for a time, the money budgeted for them spent on other things.

You could argue — and I would — that in many ways, who replaces Joe Pennachetti will be more important for the lives of Torontonians than who wins the mayoral election.

Pennachetti has recommended that deputy city manager John Livey serve as interim replacement, and Livey is considered a leading candidate for the permanent job. He’s been a deputy to Pennachetti for three years, handling important files such as the waterfront, transportation and garbage collection, and served as Markham’s city manager for more than a decade before that.

But he won’t be the only candidate considered. While offering very high praise for Livey, Robinson says it will be important to stage an international search, for someone who can “make a clean break from the circus of the past four years as we start really focusing on city building and restoring the reputation of the city.” We may, she says, wind up finding Livey or another internal candidate is best for the job after such a search, but given the critical role of the job in Toronto, we need to “do our due diligence.”

Ceta Ramkhalawansingh, a longtime member of the Toronto public service who was appointed to fill a vacancy on city council this summer, says the new city manager will need “walk-on-water skills,” because the job is so big and complex and important.

The next mayor and council will appoint the new manager after a selection process that will start now with compiling a list of candidates.

Who will oversee that first stage of the candidate search? City staff, under the direction of Joe Pennachetti. The most powerful man in city government, still.

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